X-bit Watch: NVIDIA to Rejoin 3DMark Beta Program.

OCAddiction has an interview with Omegadrive, a developer of custom tweaked drivers for ATI Technologies and NVIDIA GPUs with some changes, including various bug-fixes, extra detail levels in certain cases and other improvements. Recently, NVIDIA lawyer contacted Omegadrive and asked not to develop drivers for NVIDIA hardware and put away the company’s logo from his site. In interview Omegadrive explains his positions, what he is doing and says several words about his relationships with ATI Technologies and NVIDIA. Read the interview over here.

GamePC written a very interesting article about XDR (eXtreme Data Rate) DRAM technology, recently jointly announced by Rambus, Toshiba and Elpida (see our news-story). The article covers plenty of technical detail about XDR DRAM technology, particularly, the way to achieve 8 bits per clock cycle data rate (Octal Data Rate or simply ODR). In overall, the technology is very promising, but so was Direct RDRAM, the technology developed also by Rambus and we all know where this technology is now. Bearing in mind some court actions, started by Rambus against certain memory manufacturers, I suppose even excellent technique will not help the company to promote its XDR memory. Anyway, article at GamePC is a worth reading. You can find it over here.

NotForIdiots reports that NVIDIA is set to rejoin Futuremark’s Beta Program and Futuremark even agreed to develop a demo NVIDIA’s highly-anticipated NV40 graphics processor to be launched at Comdex. Hopefully, NV40 GPU will be a success and a power so that NVIDIA will not exit the Beta Program two months before the new benchmark’s arrival saying that the benchmark is biased towards a rival. Anyway, read more about NV40 here, more about 3DMark03-related scandals here and a quote from NFIhere.

The ModFathers has an article titled “Heat Spreaders, The Myth”. Manufacturers of high-speed DRAMs pre-install heat-spreaders on their modules, but does this aluminum or copper plates actually help to reduce module temperature? The ModFathers concluded that not. Anyway, they do not think that this is a terrible news, as modules with heat-sinks, indisputably look much better than ordinary modules. Read the article here.